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An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Bezos's commercial spaceflight company, Blue Origin, has kept its plans secret to better compete with rivals such as Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. But in order to build its launch facility in West Texas, it has revealed some details of its future operations: Blue Origin's Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) will carry three or more passengers on suborbital, ballistic trajectories to altitudes in excess of 325,000 feet above sea level. It will launch vertically and land vertically, and will use hydrogen peroxide and kerosene as propellants. It will operate autonomously under control of on-board computers, with no ground control. Blue Origin plans a maximum rate of 52 launches per year."

I'm not sure of the geography of Nevada or Utah, but Texas has a coast and a big gulf full of splashdown area.

That was my first thought as well, but upon further reflection it doesn't hold much water. (ha ha) The craft is designed for suborbital hops that involve vertical take off and landing on dry land. Without better knowing the flight profile, it's always hard to say, but it doesn't appear that this craft ever passes over water. It just goes straight up and comes back down.

Before Carmack started playing with rockets, there were plenty of VTVL prototypes and designs. DC-X, SASSTO, etc.

Carmack's first attempt used an H2O2 monopropellant engine. This one uses H2O2 as oxidizer and Kerosene as propellant. It is not the same thing by a long shot. To be honest, I would have used O2 instead of H2O2 for the oxidizer (like Carmack is finally doing now). H2O2 is more expensive and decomposes into H2 and O2 easily. Too much trouble considering what it is worth. The only real bonus is that H2O2 is not cryogenic.

Peroxide is simple (albeit ridiculously low ISP by itself) in theory. However, trying to burn catalytically in practice without a liquid catalyst (and even with a liquid catalyst...) is much easier said than done. There are big problems with quenching - the expansion of the gasses from peroxide decomposing on the catalyst tends to drive off other peroxide. Also, the catalyst packs tend to get ruined by the chemicals that stabilize your peroxide (and unless you can get 100% pure peroxide, you need stabilizers). Armadillo has had no end to problems like this; their engines have had big sputtering and performance problems.

All the quenching problems were with our mixed-monoprop scheme that used low concentration (50%) peroxide mixed with a small amount of methanol.

If you can get high concentration peroxide (85%+), there are no catalyst quenching problems. We started out with 90% peroxide, and we would still be using it (and would have saved a year of work...) if we had a willing supplier. The original supplier we used went out of business, and the remaining domestic supplier didn't want to do business with us, even for

Cavorite is impervious to gravity and can shield other materials from its effects. It is used to shield a craft from Earth's pull, allowing easy flight. It was named after its discoverer, Mr. Cavor, who used its levitational properties to travel to the Moon. - H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon [slashdot.org] ; also used in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [slashdot.org]

I'm assuming they mean they're going to use 'chutes to land - landing on reverse thrusters or what have you in earth's gravity well could be fairly fuel expensive, and doesn't make much sense.

Fuel isn't the cost driver for this kind of venture. VTOL is a great way to save on operational costs, since you can pick your exact landing spot instead of landing wherever the wind takes you. The technical challenges of vertical landing aren't insurmountable, as they've been overcome by at least three groups I ca

Descent requires no fuel to move downwards, however K.E. will be accumulated equal to the sum of the GPE and disippated thermal energy.

Therefore the amount of fuel required to stop a descent is less than that required to ascend.

To be honest, the best solution would probably be a combination of the two - drogue chute, main chute (both lightweight and easily re-deployable in future missions), which ensure a low velocity, and also proper alignment for the retro-rockets, which could be used for final touchdown (much like several mars missions).

So, is there ever a point during ascent where aborting the climb and returning to the launch pad requires more fuel than is available? Abort before apogee requires more fuel than riding it out, but you've got extra fuel because you aborted (theoretically). But is there a "point of no return" zone where you have to press on?

Well, yeah - the most fuel-inefficient mode would be to attempt to decelerate immediately after reaching your maximum upwards velocity - it's far more efficient to let gravity do the work for you... Apogee is only defined by the point at which your vertical velocity relative to the surface is zero, so apogee is effectively whenever you choose it. Attempting to slow at any point before apogee is, however, just silly.

"Blue Origin's Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) will carry three or more passengers"

As long as the passengers after the flight are reusable too, it should be a workable, safe plan. However, could we claim spaceflights under the "Amazon Prime Plan", which claims "Unlimited shipping privileges cost just $79 per year"? After all, it all boils down to being shipped by Amazon.

* Road geeks will appreciate the significance of this fact: Van Horn is the western terminus of U.S. Highway 90 [geocities.com].

* Due to the lack of water, tourism and mining are the only sources of income. For details on how the county's 3,407 souls bide their time while waiting for the new spaceport to be built, see the Handbook of Texas Online [utexas.edu].

And in the tongue-in-cheek words of singer-songwriter Brian Burns [coquet-shack.com]:

Welcome to Texas,Don't anybody get me wrong;We're glad y'all came to see us,Just don't forget to go back home.

The Wright brothers probably did not have to file environmental impact statements or calculate mean casuality per launch or estimate the damage of an explosion for insurance purposes or...

Jeff Bezos brought his evironmental impact statement to a conference once; it's about the size of a metropolitan phone book. It has sections that state that their rocket will not cause floods or hurricanes, will not change the flow of any rivers, will not interfere with the mating habits of local desert lizards, and on and on.

Present day aerospace development is regulated to the point of near inactivity. At least, the developers are still allowed to kill themselves in the process or nothing would get done.

On the upside, recent legislation has made launching easier. Finding a launch site with an appropriate window and a minimum of EPA hassles is still tricky.

Are they implying that this thing will be unguided? Just pointed at the sky and shot off without post launch guidance, like a bullet? That's what it sounds like to me, and would explain why ground control guidance is not seen as a problem: there's no way to guide it. It would be considerably cheaper to develop, but I'm not sure it would be too popular.

Another thing I'd like to know is, where does it land? If it's a water landing, that makes passenger safety and training more complex (they have to learn h

Commercial manned space travel still seems like quite a lofty goal - lofty enough, and expensive enough, that trying to ensure competition in the marketplace at this very early stage seems counterproductive. One would think that everyone could benefit from open cooperation between Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, at least until they both get a revenue stream going (read: customers actually in space).

Unless, that is, Bezos and/or Branson think the first-mover advantage will really translate into significant profits. I suspect, however, that those profits are in the pretty distant future, and the best way to bring the profits closer would be to cooperate.

Unless, that is, Bezos and/or Branson think the first-mover advantage will really translate into significant profits. I suspect, however, that those profits are in the pretty distant future, and the best way to bring the profits closer would be to cooperate.

Sure, but then after they get the whole thing making a buck, some guy in his basement will complain that his own personal open source ballistic rocket ship is being unfairly kept out of the hands of users by the $pace$hipOne evil monopolists.

You know, from what I hear, jet airliners basically fly themselves. It's not a major problem for a pilot to land or take off in one of these things, and once you get it up, it's basically cruise control. Of course, as they say, when you need an experienced airline pilot, there is no substitute.

What happens when something goes wrong? If this thing isn't built to have some human control when things are out of the ordinary, no one in his right mind would go up in one of these things.

OK so this thing is going to shoot straight up, then it's going to fall right back down so it will be able to land vertically... like a splashdown i assume. This doesn't sound like fun to me. I mean I think the only way you can land near where you launched with a ballistic trajectory is straight up and straight down. (well really close to it, you know what I mean)

300-sum-thousand feet?

I am just disappointed.

But on the brighter side, there are people who will pay to do this and maybe it will become a

I suggest a compromise with these "unmanned spaceflght zealots". We send each of them up in a manned spaceflight. At some pre-determined point, the spacecraft is programmed to become unmanned due to explosive decompression of the passenger compartment. Then, the flight continues on, unmanned. Everybody's happy.

Since the only real use for this sort of suborbital flight that isn't already adequately served by other methods (like high-flying aircraft) is tourism, unmanned flights wouldn't really work very well in this case.

You are going to have to have an awfully slick sales pitch to get over the fact that the flights always end with 600 mp/h impact at former Soviet Union strategic targets. Other than that, it's a great flight, man!

Approximately 1/3 of astronauts get space adaption syndrome. Basically, when you're in microgravity, the fluid in your inner ear doesn't settle, and so doesn't give your body a proper sense of balance. This does cause nausea and disorentation (lasting for up to a few days) in some people. Since these sub-orbital hops only give a few minutes of weightlessnesss, this will hopefully not be an issue.

Both companies (virgin and blue origin) are run by people who have more money than they know what to do with... trying to create a new market is risky and expensive. To rich people it's gambling and that's exciting. To Aerospace engineers (like me) it's exciting to see people taking the initiative to try a new market, and do something that has been traditionally relegated to government contractors - the building of space hardware. Before the X-prize you (for the most part... there were some exceptions) had

Were you never a kid? Have you never wanted to see the earth as a blue ball with a thin layer of hazy atmosphere against the black of space? Have you never wanted to experience serveral minutes of uninterrupted weightlessness? Lots of folks would love the chance to experience that. Unfortunatly probably only a rich few will have the chance at it from these companies.

I can appreciate the gee-whiz factor involved in this - who *wouldn't* want to take a ride in a spaceship?

What I'm asking is this: besides being a *very* expensive roller coaster, what practical applications does this have right now? It would be great if there were somewhere for us to *go* other than up and then down.

The good news is that if/when we can live on another planet we'll know how to get there.